“Say, wanderer, didst love thy life? Wast afraid or sorrowful to leave it, in its dawn? Or foundest thou comfort in the thought of eternal rest for thy battling wings?
“And I, O living Thistledown, teach me my way! Shall I follow thee into the great world, to roam there seeking why men love to live? Or shall I also, like thee, leave it all? Shall I go, knowing nothing of the joy of life? Or, again, shall I practise a weary courtesy, and remain to bring echoes of laughter into that Twilight Castle, for the sake of the love I bear its Twilight Lady? Her life, my flutterer, hath been such a dream of tears as even thou and I, dead thing, have never known. Yea, many a time while I laughed and shouted at the light crew of damsels that sleep there now, my heart hath bled for her. O Ghost of the Morning, know you what Eleanore, our lady, thinks of me, the fool? And yet, yet I do so deeply pity her—”
“Thou pityest me, David?” echoed Eleanore, advancing till she stood before him, forgetful of how her appearance must startle him.
David looked up at her, winking slowly, like one that would bring himself out of a dream-world into reality. “Lady of Twilight, thou’rt a woman, lonely and mournful, forsaken of thy children. Therefore I grieve for thee,” he said slowly, gazing at her with his big eyes, but not rising from where he sat.
“A woman,” said Eleanore, looking at him with a half-smile, and echoing his tone,—“a woman doubtless is always to be pitied; and yet what man deems it so? Master David, ye are all born of women, and ye are all reared by them. Afterwards, in youth, ye wed, use us as your playthings for an hour, and then leave us in your gray dwellings, while ye fare forth to more manly sports and exploits. There in solitude we bear and rear again, and later our maidens wed and our sons depart from us, and for the last time, in our age, we are left alone to die. Truly, David, thou mayest well pity!”
David’s wide mouth curved in a bitter smile.
“Even so, Madame Eleanore. And now, for fifteen years, I have lived as a woman lives. Mayhap by now I know her life better than other men—if, indeed, I am a man, being but little taller than the animals. And all these things said I to my dead friend here in my hand.”
“’Tis now fifteen years since thou camest with my lord to Crépuscule?”
“Ay, fifteen. I was then a boy of about such age. Fifteen years in Le Crépuscule by the sea! It is a lifetime.”
Madame sighed. Then her face brightened again as she looked down at the dwarf. “What was the life of thy youth, David? ’Tis a tale I have never heard.”